Thursday, September 10, 2009

The Garbage Men of Stockholm

In the course of complaining about something (more on this, I bet) to my assemblywoman, I mentioned that we were being forced into the inconvenient and very expensive mandatory recycling program by Anchorage's Solid Waste Services. She wrote to SWS, who responded in part, "Many of our Phase I customers complained loudly about the expense and inconvenience of the automated program before we started, but now really like the system."

Did you know that in the Soviet Union, there were no phone books? Telephone numbers were given out on a need to know basis. In contrast, at the dawn of the Internet Age, the mantra was "Information wants to be free. Om" Okay most of that was that we all wanted to steal music. Like St Paul said, "All things are lawful, but not all things are expedient. Francis Schaefer said that among his students this freedom was misinterpreted as license. Just now, you need to know that keeping my hands on the keyboard is introducing a tone of reasonableness and civility that was missing earlier today when I was talking about this. Then, my hands were waving in the air. Sure, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, but here, this freedom is running amok and littering because everyone in this town with a printing press is lobbing phone books into my yard, and I'm sick of it. And planning on being even sicker of it, when I have to start dealing with expensive and mandatory garbage men. I suggested to my assemblywoman an opt-in requirement but the SWS guy besides positing that soon I'd love being held hostage by garbage men, said that the phone book company goons would mount a legal challenge, so there was nothing we could do. Because if a lawyer throws a phone book at you, it's fine, but just you try it, and they'll throw the book at you, so to speak.

More health news, for the only mildly squeamish. Yesterday Karen called me at work and told me that her tubing had popped apart and was spurting blood. I told her that she should call the home health people in charge of her pump since their office is right at the end of our street. She did and they came and fixed it all up. When I got home, she had changed clothes and their was no sign of any problem. Because Bernie had followed her around licking up all the blood.